Public Domain Forths

Updated 06/20/2009

History of eForth - Kevin Appert:

eForth was developed several years ago by Bill Muench. He built a simple meta-compiled Forth that has some interesting aspects. The main goal as I understand it was portability. Bill writes: "eForth allows me to make a complete Forth system with about 30 very simple machine code routines. With so few words to code, I could do the coding by hand, that is, without the need to write an assembler first. After this simple model is running, it is desirable to code much of the rest in assembly." The descendant of this original work is on Bill's website.

After that, C.H. Ting wanted a simple, portable Forth to be the new FIG-Forth. He wanted to have a Forth to spread around, to use for his own work and to be a part of his "Firmware Engineering Workshop". At Ting's request Bill coded eForth in MASM to produce an assembly listing much like the original FIG-Forth distribution. Ting felt that more common folk could get started with a process that didn't involve the complexities of a meta-compiler. Ting and others have continued to evolve eForth, porting to many processors and environments. There's even a Linux port. Ting is working on an eForth variant in C.

This is a collection of Forth programs and Forth hardware designs placed in the public domain by the eForth Group to encourage hardware and software engineers to study and evaluate computers and software based on the eForth model. Due to the limited time available, this collection is an alpha release, which collects the existing materials in a somewhat organized manner. The materials included, especially the tutorials, will be revised to make the presentations clearer and more easily understandable.

Index file

Index file - 4Kb text file

Zip file - 8Mb zip file